Thought of the Day about Human Progress
Thought of the day in response to our new electric kettle...
All constructive responses and reflections are invited and encouraged.
This morning I used the aforementioned kettle, pictured here amidst the post-holiday clutter of our kitchen counter, to pour boiling water into a french press for my morning coffee
The glass container becomes very hot during the boiling process. My clumsy and careless knuckles would have grazed it were it not for the feature circled in green, a sort of interior continuation of the handle that protected me from this tendency and saved said knuckles from a painful scalding that would have followed me around for at least a day, causing pain, inconvenience, and pangs of regret.
At some point an engineer designed that feature into this kettle and many others models like it, initiating a process of manufacturing and logistics that spans the globe, to save my vulnerable knuckles and those of countless other hot beverage consumers from this minor trauma.
The result for me is gratitude for having my needs anticipated (although this sense of anticipation is more likely a response to the past mishaps of others) and the freedom to proceed through my day unencumbered by the disability and memory of this (admittedly minor) trauma. (Note: minor or not, it was significant enough to justify commission of engineering and manufacturing resources - clearly many people across various levels of power found this solution to be a worthwhile investment.)
This allows me to spend my limited time, energy, and intention with greater freedom as I calculate how best to maximize flourishing for myself and others; thanks to this feature of the kettle, my freedom is more abundant. While I am not directly involved in the process of designing, manufacturing, or distributing kettles I am involved in my own comparable processes of service, problem solving, and advancement of human flourishing, which this kettle's safeguard facilitates somewhat.
Thoughts/questions for your consideration:
1️⃣ This implies a certain shape of human life (perhaps all life, and maybe even all of existence) which is that of optimization. Though it may be hard to see at times, it implies that states of being move toward the goal of a superior state.
2️⃣ It can only be toward a superior state, and not a perfect one, because perfection would require the cessation of time. The need to fill time is perhaps the deepest human problem (I suspect that it is). All innovations (and indeed all acts), then, focus on the question of how to improve our experience of the time we have.
3️⃣ We rely on this cycle to continue far into the future - when we bring children into the world we implicitly assume that they will find new opportunities to help society optimize in succeeding generations and thus find prosperous employment and personal/professional fulfillment as they do. This requires endless dissatisfactory states to improve.
4️⃣ This perpetual cycle can be deeply inspiring or demoralizing, depending on how one looks at it (I find). How do you reconcile this grand cycle and come to terms with it? How do you find inspiration? I assume that inspiration is superior to demoralization, of course.
5️⃣ This outlook finds great meaning in problems and traumas, in that they provide the basis for human ingenuity and resilience, which are universally celebrated. It seems, then, that existence is well set-up (hard not to anthropomorphize this) to increase human valuation. Is this not a variety of the teleological argument?